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by bloominsummer



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Declarations Of Love, First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 10:33:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12188295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloominsummer/pseuds/bloominsummer
Summary: Teen Wolf ended today and my babies deserve better than the canon storyline, so I wrote a piece as a homage.Derek left at the end of Season 4 and Stiles found him a year later as he was interning with the FBI.Events in Season 5 and 6A occurred.





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**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: I don't own the characters in this fic. No copyright infringement is intended.

A year ago, when the Berserker took Scott and left him mortally wounded, Derek could practically see the moment where Stiles’ heart broke as he told him to leave him to die and find Scott instead.

Derek didn’t expect to find such hurt in Stiles’ eyes, although when you have a wound the size of a basketball gushing out blood from your chest, you wouldn’t do much thinking or expecting either.

He just wanted it to end so that he won’t have to see the expression on Stiles’ face anymore. He was glad that Stiles chose that moment out of the years they’ve known each other to listen to him. He turned around and left, and Derek died.

Except he didn’t. He evolved, and the pack saved the day as they always had.

He got his shit together and put on some clothes, because apparently doing a full-shit to his wolf form and then another one back to human meant that he wasn’t going to wear anything at the end of it.

Then he drove to Scott’s house.

Stiles was on the front porch, either standing guard or waiting for him. He straightened his back when he saw Derek’s car pulling into the driveway, so Derek decided it was the latter.

“Scott, is he safe?” he asked Stiles as soon as he got down from the car.

Stiles nodded, jerked his head in the direction of the house. “He is. He’s inside.”

“Good. Are you okay?” Derek walked towards him.

Stiles didn’t answer him at first, and then: “Not really.”

“Did they get you? Where does it hurt?” Derek’s heart raced and he grabbed Stiles’ arm to pull him closer inspect his body for cuts or wounds, but he couldn’t find any.

Stiles pulled away from him, put his arms around himself like he was cold. “No, they didn’t get me.”

“Okay,” Derek breathed out in relief, “then what is it?”

“What is it? What is IT?” Stiles’ raised his voice. He glared at Derek like he just said something that deeply offended him. He didn’t stop there. He dropped another truth bomb on him. “What it is, is that you died.”

There were tears threatening to spill out from Stiles’ eyes. Derek wanted so desperately to just wipe them away, but he didn’t know if he was allowed to do such thing. To touch Stiles.

“I came back,” he says softly.

Stiles gave him another glare, this time even more unwavering than the last. “Yes, but I didn’t know that.”

Derek listened to his heartbeat.

“I scared you?”

Stiles looked away from him, blinking hard a couple times. Derek’s surprised he wasn’t blowing snot all over the place at that point.

“Yeah.”

‘Why?” he asked, more out of surprise than curiosity. Surprised that it would affect anyone beside Cora so deeply if he was gone.

“Because you _died_. Do you have any idea what it means to me? Derek—“

Derek surged forward then, cupped Stiles’ face with his hands and covered Stiles’ lips with his own. It felt like the most natural thing he had ever done as their bodies swayed slowly together while they kissed.

He took his time exploring Stiles’ mouth, branding the taste of him into his memory. It was unfortunate when eventually he had to let Stiles go as they both needed to catch their breaths. Stiles looked at him with his cheeks streaked with silent tears, though his bright eyes held more wonder than sadness in that moment.

Derek kissed his forehead and lingered there before burying his nose in Stiles’ hair while he clung onto Derek, desperately trying to get him closer.

In the end, they never got to talk about their kiss, because Derek left two days after that and didn’t tell anyone where he was going.

 

* * *

 

 

He should have known that sooner or later Stiles would find him. And of course, by Derek’s luck, he would save his wolf ass at least twice in the process.

He heard all the heartbeats and footsteps before he saw the people, but he made the mistake of trying to recognise a familiar scent—Stiles’ scent—which made his brain short-circuited before he could identify the static noise he was hearing as radio. Hunters don’t use radio. He’d heard the guns, but it was nothing different than usual. The radio, however, the radio meant something else.

The radio meant government, in this case.

He was ready to walk back to his car and get the hell out of the place. It was an abandoned warehouse, a perfect place for a secret hunter’s gathering that Derek didn’t think twice before deciding to stake it out. It was obviously an error in judgment. Derek didn’t get to think about it too much though, because he made another mistake then. He hesitated for a second, torn between following his instinct to flee or stay and try to find Stiles—because what the hell was he doing here?—, and then there shots were fired at him.

Derek growled and ran. The bullets weren’t laced with wolfsbane, but enough of them would still slow him down, enough for those agents to come and get him eventually. They hit him four times before Derek could lose them inside the warehouse.

Someone came at him from the side as he was trying to scan his way out, and Derek readied his claws and fangs. He grabbed the agent by the shoulder and slammed him onto the wall. The other person seemed to have really bad balance because he fell against Derek and sent them both tumbling to the ground.

Derek grunted in pain as his blood painted the concrete floor. He had to move fast to get the upper hand, so he ignored the excruciating pain and flipped both them over so that he was at the top and he raised his hand, prepared to slap the gun out of the guy’s hand. Only then did he realised that it was a familiar face and that there was, in fact, no gun involved.

Stiles practically screamed at him, trying to pry Derek’s claws away from his shoulder. There was blood on his shirt where Derek left his handprint.

“It’s me it’s me it’s me! It’s ME!”

Derek stared at him. The idea of Stiles being there didn’t immediately sink in. He might have noticed his scent, but to actually have the real thing in front of him is surreal.

“Stiles?!”

Stiles pushed at his shoulders hurriedly. “Come on, get up! Up, Derek, let’s go!” he said, rather frantically, even more than the usual Stiles level of frantic.

“What— how— why are you here?”

Stiles rolled his eyes as if it wasn’t obvious why he was there, but he hold out a hand to Derek anyway. He took it, and Stiles pulled him up.

“Saving your life! Come on, please!” Stiles was already walking away from Derek before he stopped and face-palmed himself. “I forgot,” he said, handing Derek a bulletproof vest with FBI written in huge, white block letters on it, “wear this. Hurry, Derek. Stop staring.”

Derek took it, but he didn’t follow Stiles when he moved. Instead, he blurted out an, “I’ve missed you.”

The other man turned around to look at him. He gave him the most incredulous look, and Derek never thought their roles would be reversed. Stiles used to be on the receiving end of Derek’s glares, not the other way around.

“This is not the time nor the place, I swear to God,” Stiles grumbles, the tip of his ears were already turning red. He shrugged the vest on Derek forcibly and tightened the strap.

Then walked away again and this time Derek followed behind him.

“I should have called.”

Stiles raised a hand to stop him. There was an agent just right after the corner. They waited for him to make his turn, then went the way he came.

“You don’t have a phone.”

Oh, yeah, there’s that.

“Yeah, I should probably get one, right?” Derek wondered.

“Shut up,” Stiles dismissed him. He motioned Derek to the side exit of the building. “Follow me.”

They got outside unharmed, but Derek was still bleeding all over the place from the hits he took earlier. That plus the heat from the sun had him feeling a little faint. Stiles noticed his slow steps, so he grabbed Derek’s arm and slung it over his own shoulder, carried him toward the Camaro, parked discreetly at the back of the building.

There was a static crackle, then a voice coming from what sounded like Stiles’ chest.

“Stilinski, come in. Update position. You have eyes on the target?”

Stiles took the walkie-talkie from his vest and slammed in on the ground. It shattered into pieces, but he proceeded to stomp over it a couple more times for good measure. Derek thought he wouldn't want to be on Stiles’ bad side, ever. Stiles took another small device from one of the pockets of his vest and threw it as far away as he physically could while still supporting Derek’s weight.

“It was my tracker chip,” he explained. “You have your keys?” Derek nodded, tapping his front pocket with effort. “Let’s go.”

He got Derek in the passenger’s seat and put a seatbelt over him, as if he wasn’t staining the car’s interior with blood already. Then he drove them away from the place. Derek didn’t speak, it was hard to even try. There was blood in his mouth, and the wound on his chest wouldn’t stop bleeding. It must’ve hit a blood vessel.

“There’s a motel near here,” Stiles said after he drove for a minute, reading Derek’s mind and answering his silent question about where they were heading.

There was indeed a motel near there. It turned out that Stiles already got a room even before he went on the operation, so Derek leaned on him all the way from the car to the bed and tried his best not to pass out. Derek had so many questions, one of them being how Stiles had been prepared all of this. Before he could even get a word out, though, Stiles plunged a needle into this thigh and the world blurred before it disappeared completely.

 

* * *

 

 

When he came to, Stiles was sitting on the chair next to the bed, watching him. When he saw Derek was waking up, he helped him sit and gave him a water bottle.

“I changed your plates. They put an APB on the one you were using. Next time you should use a less conspicuous car, like a Honda. The Camaro stood out too much.”

“Stiles—“

“I gave you one of Deaton’s concoction. Well, Deaton’s concoction recipe, but I made it,” he explained. There was a hint of pride in this voice and Derek couldn’t help but share the feeling with him.

“Thanks,” Derek told him. “For saving my life. Y’know.”

Stiles leaned back in his chair and cross his arms across his chest. “Scott told me you left the country.”

Yup, Stiles was definitely, to some level, pissed. Even if he didn’t say it to Derek’s face.

“I did. Something came up and I came back, I was following a lead on hunters.”

“Right.”

“Are you angry at me?” Derek asked tentatively.

“The first I hear of you in a little over a year is in an FBI briefing. What do you think?”

God, he missed Stiles. He told him that before, right? He did. He must have. “I’m sorry.”

“You left and didn’t even say goodbye. Scott got his goodbye. For God’s sake, even Lydia got hers. I’m just the, what, guy you weren’t really close with?” HIs voice was calm, his delivery monotone. He acted as though he was interrogating Derek, a suspect and not Derek, a friend who’s not really one. His heart didn’t lie, though, not as hard as his expression tried to.

“That’s not it,” he told him softly, reassuringly.

“Then what is it?” Stiles demanded.

“I didn’t know how to say goodbye to you.”

It was the truth. He simply didn’t say goodbye to Stiles because he couldn’t.

Stiles scoffed at his explanation. “That’s not a good enough excuse.”

“Stiles—“

That seemed to made something snapped inside of Stiles. He walked to the end of the room, wanting to put as much distance as possible between him and Derek. Then he turned around, seemingly changed his mind about giving Derek a talk and proceeded to explode all over the place.

“I got freaking erased by the Horsemen of Apocalypse! You didn’t even call! Not. One. Freaking. Call.”

Derek wanted to say he understood completely what Stiles meant, but he really didn’t have one single clue what he was talking about.

“What do you mean, Horsemen of Apocalypse?”

He threw his hands in the air, exasperated with the situation. “The Ghost Riders,” he explained.

“The Ghost Riders,” Derek repeated.

“Why are you repeating what I said? Yes, the Ghost Riders. They took me and made everyone forgot about me. Of course, you didn’t need their help. You were doing the forgetting thing just fine on your own.”

Oh, the Ghost Riders. The one with the horses that took people and— “When was this?”

Stiles was pacing back and forth in the room at this point. “Five months back, why is that important? You didn’t care, Derek. You didn’t call, even after you remembered forgetting me.”

Derek didn’t forget Stiles. Not even for a second. He smiled to himself and told Stiles as much, “I didn’t forget you.”

“What? Everyone forgot,” Stiles squinted his eyes at him suspiciously.

“Not me.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not,” Derek said confidently. “I get you postcards every week. I just never mailed them. They’re in my glove compartment.”

Stiles stared at him and Derek stared back, unyielding. Then Stiles grabbed his keys from the bedside table and went outside without another word. When he came back, he was holding the brown envelope Derek kept in his car. It has all the postcards he bought for Stiles in it. Stiles walked over to the end of the room and leaned against the wall while he opened the envelope and read the writing on the cards in silence.

Derek gave him time.

After Stiles finished, he looked up from the cards and then stared outside the window. Derek smiled triumphantly. “Would I have done that if I have done that if I had forgotten you?”

“Why didn’t you ever mail these?” Stiles questioned, still not looking at him.

“That would beat the purpose of going off the grid.”

“Then why did you get them?”

He steered the conversation away from that particular topic. Or at least he tried to. “You went to FBI, huh? That’s really good, Stiles. How did you get here?”

“I convinced the SAC to take me on the search.”

“What’s SAC? And you just.. convinced them? With your excellent interpersonal skills?”

“Special Agent in Charge. And yes, I just convinced him.”

“What are you going to tell them? You’re missing after an operation, they’d be looking for you.”

“You held me hostage, I saw nothing and heard nothing. Possibly hypnotised. They will find me in the side of the highway tomorrow. Or two days from now. Depends.”

“On what?”

Stiles ignored him. And to his credit, he didn’t relent.

“Why did you get them if you were never going to send them to me?”

The younger man hadn’t changed much, for better or for worse. Derek knew there was a small chance of him getting out of this conversation without telling the truth. Derek pried open the gauze pads on his chest to stall the conversation by pretending to check on his wound, but it was almost completely healed. He couldn’t exactly pretend to slip into unconsciousness.

“Stiles…” he pleaded.

“Derek.” was the stern reply he got.

“I just get them because I know will eventually find my way back home. To you,” Derek sighed. “Then I can just give them to you directly, like a memorabilia of some sorts.”

It felt good to get that off his chest, like a weight has been taken off. Stiles was looking at him, but the look he was giving Derek was no longer as angry as the previous ones. It reminded him of the one Stiles gave him the night they kissed.

Stiles licked his lips nervously, at a loss for words.

“You could have called,” he told Derek eventually.

“I don’t have a phone.”

“That’s what pay phones are for, stupid ass.”

Derek laughed. Leave it to Stiles to call him names and get him to laugh at the same time. “I missed you,” the words escaped Derek before he could stop it.

“I heard you the first time,” Stiles admitted.

Then why hasn’t he said it back? It was obviously a mutual feeling between the two of them.

Well, Derek could think of one reason. “Are you still angry at me?”

“Yes. You would be too, if I bailed on you without an explanation.”

He was right. Derek would probably go out of his mind. Even if he didn’t make any contact with the people in Beacon Hills, it didn’t mean he didn’t go to the Beacon County online newspaper directory and searched for their names every time he came across a town big enough to have a library with a working internet connection. He would always start with Stiles’ name. He wished long and hard every time that he wouldn’t find the words ‘teenager’ and ‘dead’ in the same sentence when he read those articles.

“I’m going to come back eventually, after I get all the facts straight about what’s happening outside Beacon Hills.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that.”

You said the same thing that night, Derek almost reminded him.

“But even if I did,” Stiles continued, “that doesn’t explain why I didn’t get a goodbye. Or even a text. Or a note, left on my front porch. Anything.”

“The reason I didn’t come to see you is that if I did, I wouldn’t have left. But I had to find Cora, she was in trouble.”

Both statements were truths. Derek left to look for Cora because his sister had sent him an SOS text and couldn’t be reached after. He found her in a safe house for a hunter group in Argentina, bounded and tortured for information on Derek and the McCall pack. He couldn’t leave Cora afterwards and they kept moving from places to places to avoid being tracked down.

He heard of other packs in South America and tried to find them, but he ended up finding dead bodies more often than not. That was why when he crossed the border back into the country and heard about people rallying to eliminate werewolves pack by pack, he couldn’t miss the supposed secret gathering in the warehouse.

Derek told Stiles the story and his face scrunched up in concentration as he absorbed the new information. He thought it was utterly adorable.

In the end, Stiles still wasn’t satisfied with his answer, so Derek tried again because he was aching to touch Stiles, even just a handhold would do. “You were still in school. Your dad is in Beacon Hills and so was Scott.”

That was also true. Stiles was human, and to Derek, that was his most important trait. He had a chance to live a normal life where he didn’t have to worry about whose pack is being hunted and where to hide safely at the next full moon. The quota of supernatural problems he had to deal with in Beacon Hills was more than enough.

“Or?” Stiles challenged him.

Derek gave in. “Or I would’ve asked.”

“You would’ve ask me… what?”

Of course Stiles wouldn’t make it easy for him. “Do I have to spell it out?”

Stiles raised his chin defiantly. “Do you want me not to be angry anymore?”

Derek did. Derek really did. There was so little distance between them in the first time in a year and Stiles stayed as far away from him as possible for no good reason other than the fact that Derek loved him too much.

“I would have asked you to come with me,” he confessed.

Derek thought Stiles knew this was coming, that he was just fishing it out of Derek. Apparently not. Stiles looked genuinely shocked over his admission, like he never expected that answer from Derek in a million years.

He tilted his head slightly and swallowed. There was an instant bulge forming in Derek’s pants at the view. Stiles pointed a finger at him and warned, “Don’t fuck with me, Derek.”

“I’m not,” Derek demurred.

“So when you kissed me…”

Well, Derek did owe Stiles a conversation about that kiss. “I wanted to.”

“It wasn’t the adrenaline rush?” he asked, hopeful. Or at least Derek would like to think he was hopeful.

“Might have been,” Derek pretended to think deeply and Stiles’ shoulders dipped a little, “if I can get one watching you eat fries in my car.”

“The scene of me eating fries makes you want to jump my bones?” he reiterated. Derek nodded and Stiles cackled, “Once more, consuming junk food pays off.”

The laugh died off on Stiles’ lips as soon as it arrived, but his eyes were still smiling long after the silence kicked in. “I came on every possible search they had where you might appear. I always had a room booked at a motel near, just in case you get hurt. Good thing I did, huh? This was actually my fourth try at finding you," Stiles rambled.

He stares at Derek silently for a while. "I think I love you,” Stiles whispered eventually. Derek didn’t need to listen to his heartbeat to know he was telling the truth.

“You... think?” Derek prodded.

He certainly didn’t expect Stiles to tell him that after not seeing each other for some time, but Stiles always managed to surprise him in the best ways possible. It was a very Stiles thing to do. It was candid and spontaneous, two adjectives best used to describe Stiles. Derek knew he felt the same, he had felt the same since the night they shared their first kiss. A little part of him hoped that Stiles caring enough about his life meant that he loved Derek romantically, but he thought it would take more years for the two of them to figure it out.

Absence did make the heart grow fonder, didn’t it?

Stiles shook his head at Derek’s question then. “No, I know.”

Derek nodded, took a moment to let the information sink in. Then he looked up at Stiles and told him point-black, with the most serious expression on his face, “Same here.”

“Did you just say ‘same here’?”

“I love you too, I think,” Derek confirmed, grinning.

Stiles turned Derek’s own words against him. “You think?”

“No, I know.”

Stiles looked at Derek through his eyelashes and gave him a small, reserved smile.

“I’m still sorry I left,” Derek told him one more time for good measure.

Stiles didn’t seem to agree with the sentiment. “No, that’s not what you should be sorry about. You should be sorry because you left without telling me why or without telling me at all, for that matter. You could have said, ‘Stiles, I love you, but the world needs saving. Be back soon, xoxo’, or something.”

“I love you, but the world needs saving. Be back soon, xoxo,” Derek deadpanned.

Stiles ran his hand through his hair and shook his head at Derek’s antics. “Well, better late than never.”

“Okay. Good. You’re smiling. That’s good.”

“You wanted to make me smile? That’s it?”

“I want to make you happy,” he declared. He didn’t care that Cora would probably gag if she ever heard this story, or that Lydia would give him an ‘I told you so’ look, or that Scott would probably weep being the sentimental guy he is and then proceeded to tell him that he always knew Derek was a hopeless romantic at the core.

He didn’t care that it was the sappiest thing he’d ever said in years, because it was true and there was nothing wrong with telling the truth.

“You want me to make happy? So what are you sitting all the way over there for?” Stiles pointed out. Well, Derek hadn’t tried to move from the bed yet, although the bleeding has stopped and there was no noticeable pain in his body.

He tried to stand up and succeeded. Stiles smiled softly at him.

“Are you going to hit me if I come closer?” he asked seriously. He went through some rough things already and didn’t want to add anything else to his plate for the day.

Stiles raised his eyebrows at him teasingly. “Why don’t you get over here and find out?”

Derek did. He made his way slowly toward Stiles, who instantly put one arm around him and rested the other on his good shoulder, pulling him impossibly close until they’re sharing the same air.

Then they kissed, and just like that, Derek was home.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are highly appreciated. I hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
